The Book of Strange New Things (28 page)

‘I’ll survive,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’

‘Anything else you need,’ she said, wiping her fingers clean on a paper tissue, ‘just let me know when we get back to civilisation.’

‘The Oasans are pretty civilised, I’ve found. But it must be tough for you as a pharmacist not to have a clue what’s going on with them health-wise.’

‘Peter . . . ’ She let her head fall back against the seat and sighed. ‘Let’s not go there.’

‘That’s what people always say about places where they already are.’

She readjusted the mirror so that her own face was reflected in it. With a corner of the paper tissue she traced a line underneath her left eye, to neaten up the blurred mascara there. She did the same to her right eye. Peter was pretty sure she hadn’t worn mascara the last time they’d met.

Outside, a mishap. One of the Oasans, attempting to carry a tub in each hand, dropped one on the ground. A cloud of reddish-brown powder sprang up, covering his boots, shins and the lower parts of his pale blue robe. Another Oasan stopped to survey the damage and said, ‘สีinnamon.’

‘สีinnamon,’ he confirmed.

The two of them stood still for a few seconds, contemplating. The moist, swirling breeze carried off the loose whiteflower cinnamon, absorbing it into the atmosphere in general. The powder on the robe darkened into a glistening stain. Then, without further comment, the two Oasans resumed their labours.

Peter rolled down the window, to check if the air smelled cinnamon-spiced. It didn’t. But the artificial cool of the car’s interior was immediately spoiled by a big balmy influx.

‘
Please
,’ Grainger complained.

He rolled the window back up and let the air conditioning resume its campaign. The trapped currents of humid vapour flew around the cabin, as if sensing themselves pursued. In their search for escape or absorption they passed across his face, his knees, the back of his neck. Grainger felt it too, and shuddered.

‘Did you see them spill the cinnamon?’ Peter said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s so nice the way they didn’t make a big drama out of it. The one who dropped the tub didn’t put on a show of guilt or frustration. And his friend didn’t criticise him or make a fuss. They just noted what had happened and moved on.’

‘Yeah, it’s real inspiring. I could sit here and watch them drop our food on the ground all day.’

‘Although I must say,’ Peter remarked, ‘that the USIC personnel seem quite sensible and relaxed, too.’ Even as he said it, he had to concede that Grainger could be an exception.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Drama is a no-no.’

‘You mean . . . there’s an actual rule? Like, a regulation?’

She laughed. ‘No. We’re free to be our sweet little selves. Within reason.’ The air was growing cooler again, and she wrapped her shawl around her throat.

The Oasans were still carrying supplies to the back of the van. The sacks were all stowed now, but the plastic tubs kept coming, all filled with ingenious whiteflower creations. An awful lot of work had gone into this food, both agricultural and culinary; it seemed like an excessive amount of labour and material to exchange for a few packets of medicine. Well, quite a few packets, but still . . .

‘How come USIC has so many drugs spare?’ he said.

‘We don’t,’ she said. ‘We get extra supplies sent specially for this purpose. Every ship has a fresh lot on board: a bunch for us, a bunch for them.’

‘Sounds like quite an operation,’ he said.

‘Not really. Expenditure-wise, logistics-wise, it’s no problem at all. Drugs don’t take up much room and they weigh very little. Compared to magazines or . . . uh . . . raisins . . . or Pepsi. Or human beings, of course.’

It looked as though the last item had been deposited in the rear. Peter peered through the tinted window to find Jesus Lover One. He couldn’t see him anymore. ‘I’ll do my best to justify my freight costs,’ he said.

‘Nobody’s complaining,’ said Grainger. ‘These . . . people – the Oasans, as you call them – wanted you, and they got you. So everybody’s happy, right?’

But Grainger did not look happy. She adjusted the rear-view mirror to its correct position, which took a bit of fiddling, and her sleeve slipped off her wrist as far as her elbow. Peter noticed scars on her forearm: old self-harm, long-healed, but indelible. History written on the flesh. He’d known so many self-harmers. They were always beautiful. Seeing Grainger’s scars, he realised for the first time that she was beautiful, too.

12

Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened

The engine purred as it bore him back towards what Grainger called civilisation. Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was cool and filtered. Outside, the landscape had been abruptly transformed. For hundreds of hours, it had been the ground beneath his feet, a changeless environment for his daily routine, rock-solid under slowly evolving skies, familiar in every detail. Now it was insubstantial: a display of images flickering past tinted glass. The sun had slipped out of sight, hidden by the roof. Peter leaned his face near to the window and tried to look back, to catch a glimpse of the settlement. It was already gone.

Grainger drove with her usual careless competence, but seemed preoccupied, irritable. As well as keeping the steering wheel steady, she tapped keys on the dashboard and made numbers and symbols dance on an emerald-green screen. She rubbed at her eyes, blinked hard and, evidently deciding that there was too much air blowing onto her contact lenses, adjusted the air-con settings.

How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he’d been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn’t spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.

‘Looks like you’re the King of Freaktown,’ Grainger remarked breezily. Then, before he could take her to task for boorish disrespect: ‘ . . . as some of my USIC colleagues would no doubt put it.’

‘We’re working together,’ said Peter. ‘The Oasans and I.’

‘Sounds cosy. But they’re doing exactly what you want, right?’

He looked across at her. She had her eyes fixed on the terrain ahead. He half-expected her to be chewing gum. It would have matched her tone.

‘They want to learn more about God,’ he said. ‘So we’re building a church. Of course it’s not essential to have a physical place; you can worship God anywhere. But a church provides a focus.’

‘A signal that you mean business, huh?’

Again he looked across at her, this time staring hard until she acknowledged him with a sideways glance.

‘Grainger,’ he said, ‘why do I get the feeling our roles are reversed here? In this conversation, I mean?
You’re
the employee of a giant corporation, establishing a colony here.
I’m
the leftie pastor, the one who’s supposed to be concerned about whether the little guys are being exploited.’

‘OK, I’ll try to be more stereotypical,’ she said lightly. ‘Maybe a coffee will do it.’

She fetched a Thermos up from the floor and balanced it next to her thigh. With her left hand on the steering wheel, she attempted, with her right hand, to unscrew the firmly-sealed cap. Her wrist trembled.

‘Let me do that for you.’

She handed it over. He unscrewed the cup and poured her a coffee. The oily brown liquid was no longer hot enough to give off steam.

‘Here.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, and took a sip. ‘This tastes like shit.’

He laughed. Grainger’s face looked odd to him when he saw it up close. Beautiful yet unreal, like a plastic doll’s head mould. Her lips were too perfect, her skin too pale. But maybe it was the golden sunrise thing all over again: maybe he had already, in the last three hundred and sixty-eight hours, adjusted to the way Oasans looked, and begun to accept their faces as the norm. Grainger didn’t fit.

‘Hey, I just thought of something,’ he said. ‘The drugs you give the Oasans are requisitioned especially for them, right?’

‘Right.’

‘But, from what you were saying back there, when you were talking to Jesus Lover One . . . ’

‘Jesus
what
?’

‘Jesus Lover One. That’s his name.’

‘The name you’ve given him?’

‘No, the name he’s given himself.’

‘Oh. OK.’

Her face was impassive, with perhaps just the hint of a smirk. He couldn’t tell if she disapproved of him deeply, or thought the whole thing was just ridiculous.

‘Anyway,’ he pressed on, ‘when you were talking about diabetes, I got the impression the Oasans don’t even know what diabetes
is
. So why offer them insulin?’

Grainger finished her coffee and screwed the cup back onto the thermos. ‘I guess I didn’t want it to go to waste,’ she said. ‘The insulin wasn’t meant for them; it was our own supply. But we don’t need it anymore.’ She paused for a couple of beats. ‘Severin died.’

‘Severin? The guy I travelled with?’

‘Yup.’

‘He’s a diabetic?’

‘Was.’

Peter tried to recall the journey he’d shared with Severin. It felt like something that had happened in another phase of his life, much longer ago than a few weeks.

‘When did he die?’

‘Last night. That phrase doesn’t mean much here, I know. Toward the end of the night.’ She consulted her watch. ‘About eighteen hours ago.’ Another couple of beats’ pause. ‘You’re conducting the funeral service. If you’re willing, that is.’

Again, Peter tried to cast his mind back to the time he’d shared with Severin. He recalled BG asking Severin what religion he was, and Severin replying,
I’m nothing, and that’s the way it’s staying
.

‘Severin might not have wanted a funeral service. He didn’t have a religion.’

‘A lot of people here don’t have a religion. But the thing is, we cannot throw a dead person into an incinerator without giving him some kind of a send-off.’

Peter pondered this a moment.

‘Can you . . . er . . . give me a rough idea what sort of send-off the majority of the personnel might consider . . . ’

‘Totally up to you. We’ve got some Catholics, we’ve got some Baptists, we’ve got some Buddhists . . . You name it, we’ve got some. I wouldn’t sweat about that. You were chosen because . . . Well, let’s just say that if you were a strict Pentecostal or a strict
anything
, you wouldn’t be here. Somebody studied your resumé and made a judgement that you can handle it.’

‘Handle funerals?’

‘Handle . . . whatever.’ She clenched her fists on the steering wheel, drew a deep breath. ‘Whatever.’

Peter sat in silence for a while. The landscape continued to flicker by. A rich, fragrant smell of whiteflower in various forms began to suffuse the cabin, seeping in from the back.

Dear Peter, wrote Bea. We are in big trouble.

He was sitting in his quarters, still unwashed, and naked. Goose-pimples prickled on his flesh:
big trouble
.

His wife’s words had been sent a fortnight ago, or twelve days to be precise. She had kept silent for the first forty-eight hours of his stay among the Oasans, evidently counselling herself that anything she wrote would go unread until his return. But after two days she’d written regardless. And written again the next day, and the next. She’d written eleven more messages, all of them now stored in glowing capsules at the bottom of his screen. Each capsule bore a number: the date of transmission. To his wife, these messages were already History. To him, they were a frozen Present, yet to be experienced. His head buzzed with the urgent need to open them all, to crack open those capsules with eleven rapid-fire jabs of his finger – and buzzed also with the knowledge that he could only take them in one at a time.

He could’ve started reading them an hour earlier, in the vehicle on the way back from the settlement. But Grainger’s odd mood during the drive had discouraged him from asking her to tell him when they were close enough to the USIC base for the Shoot to work. Although he wasn’t usually secretive or prone to embarrassment, he’d felt self-conscious at the prospect of reading his wife’s personal communications right next to Grainger. What if Bea made some unguardedly intimate reference? A gesture of sexual affection? No, it was better to restrain his eagerness and wait until he had privacy.

On entering his USIC apartment, he’d stripped off his clothes, determined to shower before he tackled anything else. These last couple of weeks, working with the Oasans and sleeping out in the open, he’d become inured to sweat and dust, but his journey back to base in the air-conditioned vehicle had awakened his awareness of the muck that clung to him. It was a feeling he remembered well from his homeless years: being invited into somebody’s immaculate home and perching on the edge of their pale velour sofa, self-conscious about tainting it with his grimy arse. So, as soon as he stepped into his apartment, he decided that while the Shoot was warming up, doing its routine checks of its electronic innards, he could have a quick wash. Unexpectedly, however, Beatrice’s messages loaded in at once. Their sudden arrival was a potent presence in the room, forcing him to sit down, dirty as he was.

We are in big trouble, Bea said. I don’t want to worry you when you’re so far away and there’s nothing you can do. But things are falling apart fast. I don’t mean you and me of course darling. I mean things in general, the whole country (probably). In our local supermarket there are apology stickers on most of the shelves, empty spaces everywhere. Yesterday there was no fresh milk and no fresh bread. Today, all the UHT milk, flavoured milk, condensed milk, even coffee whitener has gone, likewise all the muffins, bagels, scones, chapattis, etc etc. I overheard two people in the checkout queue having a testy discussion about how many cartons of custard one person should be allowed to buy. The term ‘moral responsibility’ was used.

The news says that the supply problems are due to chaos on the motor-ways because of the earthquake in Bedworth a few days back. That makes a kind of sense, judging by the footage. (You know the way the top of a cake bursts open when it’s risen dramatically in the oven? – well, a long stretch of the M6 looks like that.) Of course the other roads are jammed solid now, trying to accommodate the diverted traffic.